Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Star Wars Mural

As I mentioned yesterday, Jer spent a few days with Mamaw and Pop at their farm and I decided to take advantage of the child-free time by working on his new room! When he came home I got to surprise him with his Star Wars mural:

Even though he only got to enjoy his Superhero Room for about a month before we had to move, I decided to go with a different theme instead of just recreating the old room. He is obsessed with Star Wars (especially Darth Vader) and thanks to Papa's garage sale addiction, he already had a ton of toys to decorate with.

When we first started talking about it I asked him what kind of mural I should paint and he said that he wanted a "battle scene". I was a little hesitant at first because I'm not a very good artist and I wasn't sure if I could pull off the shading and everything. Then I got the idea to do a silhouette instead. While searching for inspiration I found this awesome Popup Card. The silhouette was great and it was the battle scene in front of the death star window. Perfect!

We borrowed a projector to put the image up on the wall. If you don't have access to one, you can use this tutorial to build your own using a regular table lamp.

Then I just traced the outline with a pencil and painted it all in! It was super easy but time consuming. It was kind of fun though. I got some time by myself to watch Netflix while still being productive. :)

I love how it turned out and Jer was really excited - especially since he didn't even know that I had been working on it.

We added a few other touches like putting a screw hook on the side of the bookcase so he can hang his light saber and putting his nightlight in the Darth Vader mask on top of the small bookcase. We also surprised him with a new TV because he is a spoiled little brat. :) His room is pretty small (8' x 10.5') and there wasn't really room for his big tube tv so we got rid of it at our garage sale and used priority club points that we had saved up from all of Shelby's business trips to buy a small flat screen to put in there.

The kid is really spoiled considering how little money we actually spend. The TV was paid for with priority club points, we got the Wii thanks to a crazy college kid tossing it out on moving day, we won his iPod touch for $1 in a raffle, and all of the star wars toys came from garage sales. I know that explanation wasn't really necessary but it kind of bugs me when people assume that we spend thousands of dollars on him when in reality he gets $75 at most for his birthday and Christmas with just a couple of bucks spent here and there on toys and books found at garage sales or clearance aisles. We aren't crazy over-spenders we are just really skilled deal-finders. :)

Stay tuned for more fun Star Wars projects!

This post may contain affiliate links. These affiliate links help support this site. For more information, please see my disclosure policy. Thank you for supporting Polish The Stars.